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Pompeo: Iran policy speech 'not a fantasy'

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo defended his Iran policy as “not a fantasy,” and said President Trump expects Iran to act like any normal nation. Pompeo responded to critics who panned his 12-point list of demands for Iran as unrealistic and lacking a clear strategy.

Pompeo: Iran policy speech 'not a fantasy'

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on May 22, 2018, defended his Iran policy speech from the day before, saying "it's not a fantasy" to expect Iran not to allow groups its supports to fire its missiles at the Saudi capital, Riyadh.(Photo: Oren Dorell, USA TODAY)

Pompeo responded to critics who panned his 12-point list of demands for Iran on Monday as unrealistic and lacking a clear strategy.

“It’s not a fantasy to ask Iran not to fire missiles at Riyadh,” Pompeo told reporters during a visit to the State Department briefing room. “That's something we’d ask any other country in the world.”

Pompeo was referring to armed Houthi rebels in Yemen, who are fighting a civil war and have fired Iranian missiles at the Saudi capital, Riyadh.

Iran has also armed terror groups Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in the Palestinian territories, all of which have thousands of missiles aimed at Israel. Iran and Hezbollah helped Syrian President Bashar Assad stay in power in a lengthy civil war that has cost a half million Syrian lives. And Iran has armed Iraqi Shiite militias who worked with U.S.-trained and -equipped Iraqi government forces to defeat the Islamic State in that country.

Aaron David Miller, a former State Department peace negotiator and adviser to past Democratic and Republican presidents, wrote in an op-ed for USA TODAY that Pompeo’s “speech laid out fantastical demands that Iran will almost certainly reject and that the administration lacks the capacity to achieve.”

President Trump ditched a nuclear deal negotiated with Iran by the Obama administration with Britain, France, Germany Russia and China. The deal lifted international and some U.S. sanctions on Iran in return for limits on its nuclear activities. Trump argued that the Iran deal did not go far enough and did not address other issues, including the country's ballistic missile program and support for militants across the Middle East.

European countries, China and Russia are unlikely to go along with renewed U.S. sanctions to pressure Iran to renegotiate the deal on harsher terms that include those other concerns, Miller and others have said.

In his first major foreign policy speech since becoming the top U.S. diplomat, Pompeo said Trump's approach to Iran would ensure “Iran has no possible path to a nuclear weapon, ever.” He pledged that the U.S. would set the harshest sanctions ever on Iran to require that it cease support for terrorists and abandon its missile program.

Pompeo said Iran poses “a global challenge” and “a shared threat" to nations around the world.

“We wouldn’t tolerate Iceland… or Chad doing what the Iranians are doing,” he said. “If someone else created the equivalent of Hezbollah, we wouldn’t just sit by. Russia and China see this as a threat as well.”

Zalmay Khalilzad, a former U.S. ambassador to Iraq and Afghanistan, said earlier Tuesday that Pompeo’s plan to apply “unprecedented pressure” on Iran and to “crush” groups like Hezbollah would be difficult.

A political faction led by Hezbollah won a majority of seats in the Lebanese parliament in elections earlier this month.

Another political faction made up of militias funded and organized by Iran won the second-largest bloc of votes in the Iraqi elections. Iran has also provided much support to the Syrian government, Khalilzad said at an event at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies.

“We need to be clear about our objectives and then have a strategy to achieve them,” he said.

Stopping Iran’s military forces across the Middle East could require a guerilla war to wear down Iran, but that's risky, , Khalilzad said.

“This is the Middle East, it’s a combustible part of the world,” he said.